Men are
going the way of the dodo in our feminized society, says Warren Farrell. And
that's not good for either sex.

By Amy
Benfer

Salon
magazine Feb. 6, 2001

Warren
Farrell, the feminist, had two houses, including a "gorgeous,
gorgeous" home in the country. He drove a Maserati. Every article he wrote
about women for the New York Times was published, without exception. When he
made presentations at conferences, he was offered teaching positions in
departments where he "was not even qualified to teach." (His doctorate
is in political science, not psychology, the subject of his five books.) He was
the only man to be elected three times to the board of NOW in New York. He was
invited to appear on Phil Donahue's talk show no fewer than eight times

Warren
Farrell, the masculinist, has one house, which he does own, but it's
"nothing phenomenal." He drives a 1989 Nissan 240SX. Nothing he has
written about men for the New York Times has been published, without exception.
The college professors have stopped calling and so have the feminists (although
to this day the bio on his book jackets still begins with his NOW credentials).

During his
last appearance on "Donahue," Farrell says, he started to address
men's issues. And that was, well, his last appearance on "Donahue."
Phil didn't want him back, and Betty Friedan, if she didn't actually want him
dead, would probably have preferred to see him muzzled.

It's hard
work being a gender radical, especially when you switch sides.

Farrell
says he was "100 percent" feminist in his thinking until sometime in
the mid-1970s. At that time, he was leading anti-sexism workshops on college
campuses across the country, most of them sponsored by feminist organizations.
Farrell made men participate in "beauty pageants" to make them see
what it was like for women to be judged on their looks alone. The feminists were
good with that; they loved him; they sponsored him; they took him out to dinner
and told him how wonderful he was.

But Farrell
also wanted the women to see what it was like to be a man. Men, according to
Farrell, "take 152 risks of rejection from first eye contact with a woman
until intercourse." He decided that women should have to participate in a
role-reversal exercise in which they were forced to ask a man out. The feminists
did not like that. According to Farrell, most of them, after watching the men go
through the beauty contest, walked out when it came time to participate in the
role-reversal "date."

But
Farrell's biggest argument with feminists came in the mid- to late '70s, when,
one by one, NOW chapters across the country came out in support of giving
mothers primary custody of children in cases of divorce.

"I
said, 'Uh-huh. I see what this movement is about. It's about women having
choices, not about fairness,'" recalls Farrell. "I definitely agree
with choices for women, but I do not agree with choices for women when they
eliminate choices for men. Rather, I think that the sexes need to make choices
that lead to the maximum amount of win-win for both sexes."

Divorce,
according to Farrell, leaves men who are dependent on women for their emotional
lives with a gaping "love void" that must be filled. After his divorce
with the feminist movement, Farrell experienced a political love void, and into
it stepped men -- angry men, wounded men, men who want to be
"nurturer-connectors" but who, according to Farrell, are simply viewed
as "killer-protectors."

For
Farrell, the stereotype of men as "success objects" came to feel just
as pernicious as the stereotype of women as "sex objects," a fact that
he believes has been ignored both by feminists, who see men as the keepers of
power, and by traditional women, who rely upon men to support them.

Warren
Farrell, masculinist, writes books that tend to make headlines because of their
often inflammatory content, but that doesn't mean they are always taken
seriously in a culture that views "men's issues" with derision on the
one hand, and as a last, vicious grab for patriarchal power on the other.

His latest
book, "Father-Child Reunion," claims that American children suffer
from a "father wound" that can only be healed by ending the
matriarchal domination of family life. He seeks to integrate fathers into the
lives of their children, putting an end to maternal gatekeeping in intact
families. He believes that mother-only households should be discouraged, in part
by overturning the "tender-years doctrine," which for most of the 20th
century has encouraged judges to place young children in the primary care of
their mother in cases of divorce. He also derides alimony and welfare -- which
he calls "mother-subsidy" payments -- because he believes they
encourage women to be economically dependent.

In the
chirpy prose and rhymed couplets of self-help-speak, Farrell exposes the
pathologies of feminism and calls on men to fight back for their domestic
rights. Over 30 years feminism has replaced the benevolent patriarch with an
emasculated monster: We have gone from the "Era of Father Knows Best to the
Era of Daddy Molests; from Dad as family head to deadbeat dad."

Politically
speaking, the ideas presented in Farrell's book lurch from the left to the right
and back again. He spells out the ABCs of men's and women's reproductive rights,
calling for more research on a male birth control pill (he blames the lack of a
male pill on the sexist assumption of "the unconscious moral superiority of
women -- that men can trust women to tell the truth more than women can trust
men"), while advancing the argument that a man should have the right to
choose whether to "abort" his parental rights and obligations by
refusing to pay child support, or to veto a partner's abortion and compel a
woman to bear a child he has fathered.

"Father-Child
Reunion" will be known, at least in sound-bite form, as the book that
claims single fathers are superior to single mothers on almost every measurable
scale: Farrell has marshaled data to show that single fathers raise children who
are, among other things, more empathetic, less violent, less likely to become
teenage parents and perform better in school than children raised by single
mothers. He even claims that girls raised by single fathers have more orgasms
than those raised by single mothers.

According
to Farrell's data, single fathers are less likely than single mothers to
bad-mouth their absent spouse (a practice that Farrell calls "the most
insidious form of child abuse"), and also less likely to abuse their
children, in all categories, including physical and sexual abuse (though men are
more likely than women to be accused of sexual abuse). Also, says Farrell,
single fathers, who make up 19 percent of all single parents, tend to be better
educated and have a higher income than their female counterparts.

"I'm
not saying that men make better fathers than women do mothers," he says.
Rather, Farrell likens the man who wants to be a stay-at-home father today to
the woman who wanted to be a surgeon in the 1950s. Because men are not
encouraged to be "protector-nurturers," any man who wants to be the
primary parent to his child is likely to encounter legal, social and familial
discrimination every step of the way, says Farrell.

And thus,
explains Farrell, any man who is strong enough, emotionally and financially, to
fight that systemic discrimination is likely to be well above average in his
motivation and desire to be a parent. (Indeed, this process of self-selection
may explain why gay and lesbian parents, who have consistently had to fight for
their parental rights, have come out so far ahead of their straight counterparts
in studies that measure their commitment and skill as parents.)

Oddly
enough, Farrell is not, himself, a father. He has twice been a stepfather. The
first time, his relationship with the mother lasted five years; the second
relationship, which is still ongoing, "depending on the week or
month," has lasted for seven years. "But," says Farrell, "I
am still very close to the children and spend a lot of time with them. And I've
spent a lot of time as a camp counselor and I helped to raise my brother."

Stepfathers
do not fare well in Farrell's book -- at one point, he claims that "sexual
abuse from stepfather to stepdaughter is a common problem" and says that
biological fathers keep a distance from their children because they know that
courts will allow mothers to replace them with the man of their choice -- but
the author points to this as evidence of his own impartiality.

"I am
always someone who follows the research more than my self-interest. It certainly
has not been in my self-interest to defend men. I've gone from being quite
wealthy, when I was defending women, to being quite poor defending men. I don't
have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous
wound in kids due to a lack of their dads. The word of the day is blinding us to
what we could otherwise see, and that is what drives me to write."As it
turns out, I am probably not the best interviewer for Warren Farrell. He has
complained in the past that publications repeatedly send young women to
interview him (a ploy that must have been particularly entertaining for editors
around the time of his last book, which, among other things, claimed a man's sex
drive is his greatest point of vulnerability, which puts him in particular
danger when forced to interact with young, attractive women on a professional
basis).

What's
more, I am a single mother, though Farrell, who is nothing if not open-minded,
does not seem to hold that against me. (He does claim, however, that censorship
from a single mother-editor at Simon & Schuster caused him to switch to
Tarcher-Putnam for "Reunion.") He relays a brief history of his
relationship with his last woman-friend, a divorced mother, which flourished
despite the fact that she is a born-again Christian and he is an atheist. He
says that making love to a mother is so much better, because a mother is a woman
who has been "humbled" by motherhood, and brings an entire
"tapestry" to lovemaking.

To find
Farrell I go to Pleasanton, Calif., a Bay Area bedroom community that is indeed
pleasant in the suburban sense. At the end of two very long, very
non-pedestrian-friendly blocks, across a four-lane highway, at the end of a very
long strip mall that contains a Wal-Mart, is the Borders bookstore that will
host Farrell this evening.

Farrell is
an amiable, round, bearded man who, a Borders employee points out, looks
something like the actor Sir Derek Jacobi. He's dressed in a denim shirt and
denim jeans and is already on a first-name basis with his audience. They form a
ring around him -- two couples, one with a baby; three men accompanied by
neither woman nor child; and one man with his son -- in plastic chairs, swapping
stories, comparing the relative differences in family law between Alameda and
Santa Clara counties, interrupting each other in their eagerness to lay their
lives bare before their mentor, a man they seem certain will not only understand
them but fight for them as well.

In fact,
the woman with the baby has already spoken with Farrell, having worked her way
through the call queue on a radio show that hosted him this morning. (According
to Farrell, the host had to place a moratorium on calls from "angry
men," who flooded the phone lines with their personal tales of custody
woes.) She is a second wife, a position Farrell holds in particularly high
esteem, because, according to him, the second wife is the single most important
asset a man can have when it comes time to duke it out with the ex-wife in
gynocentric family court. Farrell praises her intelligence and she beams.
"I'm not one of those defensive women," she says.

Her husband
worked as a Y2K programmer last year, which, she says, explains why this year,
the amount of child support he is required to pay should be lowered. "And
do you know what she said in court? She tried to paint him as a Y2K
lunatic!"

Another
Farrell fan, a man dressed in a worn suit and wearing thick glasses with a
vaguely aviator cast, nods solemnly. "There are a lot of war stories out
there," he says, and proceeds to share his own with the group. He can't
even go to church because his church happens to be located across the street
from his children's elementary school and his ex happens to have a restraining
order that prevents him from going within a certain distance from the school.

He says
that his wife was a career woman during the first two years of their marriage,
while he stayed at home with the children. Then they divorced. Now his oldest
son is 13 and he hasn't seen his children in 10 years. He's trying to sue his
wife's attorneys in civil court, and has a bewildering theory that somehow he
can prosecute someone -- whether it's the ex-wife or the attorneys or the child
support collection bureau is unclear -- under RICO, the statute designed to
prevent racketeering. He's trying to start a fathers' rights group and he's
brought his business cards, which he begins to pass around the group.

At a little
before 8 p.m., a Borders employee breaks up the discussion to acknowledge that,
while Warren Farrell certainly needs no introduction to this group, it's
probably time to begin. Farrell nods genially at his host, smiles at his new
friends, stands, plants one foot on his chair and launches into his favorite
exercise, a pop quiz meant to measure men's desire to nurture.

Here it
is:

Men, would
you choose to stay home with your child full time if the following three
conditions prevailed?

1) You knew
that you would not hurt your family economically.

2) You had
your wife's approval.

3) Society
had the attitude that a well-balanced child required bonding time with both
parents, and that father time was especially essential after a baby has spent
nine months in a mother's womb.

In
Farrell's workshops about 85 percent of the men answer yes; in this group 100
percent answer yes, which is no surprise, as even Farrell himself readily
acknowledges that any group that is exclusively made up of Farrell followers is
likely to share his views on the need for men to nurture their children. Of
course, the real question is: What parent -- of either gender -- wouldn't choose
to spend time with their children if their choice had no effect on their
family's income and they knew that they wouldn't be looked down upon by their
spouse and society as "just" a house spouse?

The fact is
that all three of these conditions are almost never met, for any stay-at-home
parent. Parents who choose to stay at home know that they are choosing to place
more value on time with their child than on family income and position in
society. It's what we do within this crucible of choice -- knowing we will
inevitably sacrifice one thing for another -- that reveals what we ultimately
value.

(Farrell
says he once met a man at a panel discussion for NOW in the mid-'70s who had
negotiated the delicate balance of fatherhood and career. This man, who was
seated next to Farrell, explained that he had just left his high-paying career,
with more than enough money to retire, to stay at home with his son full time.
His wife approved; she needed time to devote to her own career. Then, someone
reached over Farrell to ask the man for his autograph. The man was John
Lennon.)Throughout history, says Farrell, men have been encouraged to be
"disposable," that is, ultimately willing to sacrifice themselves for
the greater good of the community. Men are trained for this through competitive
sports, like football. They learn that they must buy love with their own pain
(on the field or the time clock) and, ultimately, be willing to die. And they
do, mourns Farrell. Not only do men die an average of seven years earlier than
women, but they are five times more likely to commit suicide -- and 13.5 times
more likely after the age of 85.

"Do
you know the root word of hero?" he asks the Borders audience.

Turns out
it comes from "cero," which, in the original Greek, means
"servant," or even "slave." Historically, men have been
servants, says Farrell, slaves to the greater community, the servant-protectors
of women, children and old men. The mistake of feminism, says Farrell, is that
women equated serving with power and privilege, when in fact both sexes were
simply acting out their roles.

Now, for
the first time in history, says Farrell, we don't have to rely on such
antiquated notions of gender. In fact, if we do, it will only lead to mutually
assured destruction. Western industrialized society has put "our genetic
heritage in conflict with our genetic future." This, Farrell tells us, is
because, among other things, we have the nuclear bomb, and men who are bred
solely as "killer-protectors" will certainly destroy us all. And yet,
sadly, says Farrell, women are still choosing men as mates based solely on their
ability to be "protectors," at least financially speaking.

Which
brings Farrell to another exercise, during which it is established that 100
percent of the women in the audience married for money; all the men married for
looks.

It is one
of the stranger aspects of Farrell's followers: The very woman who is the most
likely to be open to the idea of "allowing" her husband to express his
nurturing side, who is the most likely to consider a nontraditional family
situation in which either partner, regardless of gender, has the option to
choose between the breadwinner role and the role of stay-at-home parent, is
likely to be, well, a feminist.And it's not likely that such a woman is going to
see much of herself in a book that insists that most women still "equate
one act of intercourse with a lifetime of economic security" and see men as
"walking wallets." It's equally difficult to imagine that the men who
are willing to enter into marriages in which they play the "success
object" to their wives' "sex object" are the same men who would
clamor for their rights to be stay-at-home dads.

Feminism
happened, says Farrell, because women naturally chose to marry men who would be
the best providers. And men who have good jobs don't tend to have much of a
nurturing side. How can they? They spend all their time at work, the better to
show their love by earning money for their families. So these rich women, not
understanding that their husbands were demonstrating their love the best they
knew how, had a lot of time and money on their hands. Rich women went to
therapists. Therapists told them they were oppressed. A movement was born.

"What
I want to know," asks one man, "is how do you do this? How do you go
on doing what you do? If I knew as much as you do, I wouldn't be able to stand
it, I'd be so angry. There are 2 million men in jail. That's a national crisis!
You never hear anything about men, just women and minorities."

Yes, says
Farrell, "we have more empathy for whales than males."That wraps up
the lecture portion of the evening. Farrell sits down to sign books, but he
insists that each person not only tell him his or her name, but a little bit
about their lives, so that he can give each and every one a personal
inscription.

Warren
Farrell is nothing if not a fountain of empathy. I get a generous helping of his
brand of personalized attention the next morning, when I meet him for breakfast
at his hotel in downtown San Francisco. He wants to know if I slept well and
inquires about the health of my daughter. Farrell, who lives in Encinitas,
Calif., just outside San Diego, would prefer to live in the Bay Area, but he is
waiting for the housing prices to drop. He's spent one day at this hotel, but he
already knows the wait staff, and they already know that he prefers his eggs
over easy.

Today,
Farrell can't choose between grilled polenta and French toast. Finally, he comes
up with a compromise: The best way to satisfy our mutual cravings for sweet and
savory is to order both, and share. "Is that OK with you?" he asks.
"Now that we are sharing, it's no longer my decision."

If American
society is suffering from a father wound, then Farrell may be suffering from a
feminist wound. "I'm an awfully loyal friend," he says. "Once
I've started a relationship with someone, it's like they are syrup and I'm a
pancake. Their syrup gets into my pancake, so to speak." The rejection he
received from feminists hurt, especially because he just sees himself as "a
1970s feminist completing the revolution."

Feminists
may claim that they want men to be involved in the home, says Farrell, "but
every single fathers' rights organization in this country would not exist if
women were open to men being involved in their children's lives. Women say, 'Get
involved, but you can't take the child here, or you have to be liberal and not
conservative.' Women want men to follow their rules, because they think their
rules are better and their values are better. And that's understandable, but
that's not equality."

"'Women's
bodies, women's business,'" Farrell says, "is a crock. It's very, very
bad. It can only come out of an insidious form of sexism that doesn't consider
anybody but the woman." True reproductive rights, says Farrell, would take
into consideration the rights of the man, the woman and the fetus. Farrell
believes that both men and women should have the right to choose abortion (in
the man's case, "abortion" could also mean refusing to pay child
support for an unwanted child), "but I believe that abortion is killing.
But I also eat meat and wear leather, and that is killing as well."

Once a
pregnancy has occurred, says Farrell, "there should be a minimal level of
involvement for both parties. If I am requiring a woman who does not want to be
a mother to be minimally involved for nine months, then a man who does not want
to be a father should perhaps be required to be involved for a year or so, to
some degree. But if either partner makes a unilateral decision to have a child
that the other partner does not agree with, then that person should have close
to 100 percent responsibility."

The
previous night, at the lecture, Farrell said that he makes a point to
"never write more than two paragraphs that I think other people would
readily agree with. After all," he mused, "if these ideas are already
in the culture, why write?" Indeed, when reading Farrell's work, one
sometimes gets the impression that he is merely taking unpopular stands in order
to stir the waters up. When I suggest as much to him, he laughs.

"Well,
the closest thing to that in this book is the section on reproductive rights. I
care more about making men part of the discussion. I'm not sure what my final
stand on that would be."

So what
exactly is Warren Farrell: Curmudgeon, rabble-rouser, neotraditionalist,
feminist, masculinist or gender transitionalist? He is a masculinist who
champions second wives as the strongest political force for getting parental
rights for their husbands, a feminist who does not believe in the absolute
autonomy of a woman's body, a man without children who has devoted 10 years to
writing a book on fathers' rights, a man who would like to see women become
breadwinners, but who also says, "The workplace benefits from women, but
the family needs men." Who, exactly, does he see as his ideal audience?

"When
I write, I have to admit, I'm writing to women in my mind more than I'm writing
to men," says Farrell. "I've always been more comfortable with women
than with men, ironically. For somebody who is one of the leading male advocates
in the world, that may seem strange. My style, my method, my desire to listen
rather than to dominate or interrupt conversation, my values are a lot more
female-oriented than male-oriented overall.

"I've
grown to like men," he assures. "But it's been much more of an
intellectual journey, which has now taken on emotional components, than it was
an initial attraction or feeling.

."When
I last speak to Farrell, he is in a hotel room in Seattle, surrounded by men.
Seattle is the hotbed of the men's movement, with more men's organizations than
anywhere else in the country. There are "wisdom councils" for men who
want to look inward and fathers' rights groups that focus on legal
advocacy.Farrell sighs, and begins talking about "the irony and
paradox" of being a father denied parental rights. The men who are the most
nurturing, who most want to be with their children, are the ones who are the
least likely to want to be embroiled in a legal controversy. "It's a very
tough combination of qualities that eliminate the men for one reason or another.
Either they're too introspective to get involved in the legal process, or they
are so aggressive that you see why they got the divorce in the first
place."

Is he ever
afraid that his work will be misappropriated and used as a legal bludgeoning
device by men who simply want to punish their ex-wives by taking their children?

"Every
piece of legal ammunition will be used by people of bad will," says
Farrell. "But fathers rarely fight for sole custody. And I make it clear in
my book that shared custody is the preferred option."

"Now,
if the father is a jerk enough to want to take the children to spite the mother
-- hah! Let the jerk experience what raising children is like. This is no
picnic! The payback is the kids. And if he's not good at this, the kids will
ruin him! There's no form of abuse in the world that is greater than the abuse
by children of parents."

Warren
Farrell, masculinist, believes that there should never have been a women's
movement that blamed men for the ills of society. There should not be a men's
movement blaming women. There should only be a gender transitional movement that
encompasses both genders. Sadly, he says, 30 years of feminism have made the
men's movement necessary. "But as soon as things get anywhere near balanced
-- if I live that long -- when men start blaming women, I will be on their backs
just as hard and as strong as I am now that it's the other way around."